The Opposition is thinking of ‘explaining’ its defeat by personal factors: Stalin’s crudity, the uncompromising attitude of Bukharin and Rykov and so on. It’s a cheapskate explanation! It’s less an explanation than superstitious nonsense… In the period between 1904 and the February [1917] Revolution Trotski spent the whole time twirling around in the company of the Mensheviks and conducting a campaign against the party of Lenin. Over that period Trotski sustained a whole series of defeats at the hands of Lenin’s party. Why? Perhaps Stalin’s crudity was the cause of this? But Stalin was not yet secretary to the C[entral] C[ommittee]; [Stalin] at that time was cut off and distant from foreign parts, conducting the struggle in the underground whereas the struggle between Trotski and Lenin was played out abroad. So where exactly did Stalin’s crudity come into that?
His handling of the plenum was a masterpiece of persuasion. He reminded the Opposition that previously he had rejected calls for the expulsion of Trotski and Zinoviev from the Central Committee. ‘Perhaps,’ he waspishly suggested, ‘I overdid the “kindness” and made a mistake.’
The joint plenum excluded Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev from the Central Committee. On 14 November 1927 Trotski and Zinoviev were expelled from the party entirely, and this decision was ratified by the Fifteenth Party Congress in December. The Stalin–Bukharin axis had triumphed. Their version of revolutionary policies at home and abroad had prevailed after a decade of constant factional strife among Bolsheviks. Bukharin maintained friendly relations with his defeated adversaries. But Stalin refused to compromise. At the Fifteenth Party Congress the further exclusion of seventy-five oppositionists, including Kamenev, was announced. Stalin and Bukharin had seen off the acute threat to the NEP. No one imagined that within a month the political settlement would be destroyed and that the two victors would become enemies. In January 1928 the New Economic Policy was about to be torn apart by the Party General Secretary.
Suddenly at the end of the 1920s Stalin trampled on the New Economic Policy like an angry bull. The economic compromise inaugurated by Lenin’s Politburo seven years earlier was rejected. Massive violence was used to introduce a system of collective farms. Forced-rate industrialisation began. Persecution of kulaks, nepmen and ‘bourgeois specialists’ was intensified. Politics too underwent change. The internal party regime was further tightened and show trials were resumed against surviving leaders of the moribund rival parties. An offensive began against every kind of nationalist tendency.1 The boundaries of cultural expression were drastically reduced and organised religion became the object of violent assault. The controversial settlement that had held since 1921 fell apart.
Stalin initiated the changes after the shortfall in grain supplies became critical at the end of 1927. On 6 January 1928 the Secretariat sent out a secret directive threatening to sack local party leaders who failed to apply ‘tough punishments’ for grain hoarders.2 Stalin let his feelings show in a letter to Sergei Syrtsov and the Siberian party leadership:3
We hold that this is the road to panic, to the raising of prices — the very worst form of barter when it is plainly impossible to meet the needs of a countryside full of peasants with marketable grain stocks: it strengthens the capacity of the powerful stratum of the countryside to resist… The peasant will not hand over his tax on the basis of a
